On the Shores of the Mediterranean (7 page)

Twenty years ago the only fish of any size that was indigenous to the Lagoon and which reproduced itself in it was something called the Gò (
Gobius ophocephalus
), which nested in the mud on the edge of the deep canals. All the others were caught in the open sea and penned in the
valli
at the northern and south-western ends of the Lagoon. Mussels were also cultivated. Whether it is
safe to eat any of these fish today must be questionable. There is no need any more for the Commune to display the warning against swimming on the door of the crumbling open-air swimming place on the Zattere, the long waterfront in Venice facing the Giudecca Canal. It is only too obvious.

The Adriatic performs this operation of filling and emptying the Lagoon four times every twenty-four hours over an area that used to be roughly thirty-five miles long and up to eight miles wide, but is now much less because of infilling and the construction of new
valli
. That is except during periods of what Venetians call
la Colma
or
l’acqua alta
, high water.

Even though the moon was nearly full there would be no
acqua alta
on this particular night.
Acqua alta
is not dependent on the tide itself being exceptionally high, or even high. It occurs when the barometric pressure falls sufficiently low to allow the level of the Adriatic to rise on what is a very low coastline, and when the strong, warm, south-westerly sirocco blows up it. If the barometric pressure is low enough and the sirocco is strong enough at the time when the ebb is beginning in the Lagoon, the water is penned inside it, unable to get out, and when the next tide begins to press in through the three entrances, the
Porti
, and is added to the high water already there, the natural divisions between the three basins of the Lagoon, the
spartiacque
, cease to exist and Venice and many other islands, inhabited and uninhabited, are flooded. Other factors can make the
acqua alta
even higher – heavy rain, a full moon, something called the
seiche
, the turning of the Adriatic on an imaginary pivot – but the sirocco and a low barometer are the two indispensable conditions.

This is not a new phenomenon. The records of the
acqua alta
from the thirteenth century onwards are full of entries such as ‘the water rose to the height of a man in the streets’ (on 23 September 1240); ‘the water rose from eight o’clock until midday.
Many were drowned inside their houses or died of cold’ (in December 1280); ‘roaring horribly the sea rose up towards the sky, causing a terrible fear … and with such force that it broke the Lido in several places’ (in December 1600).

In 1825, the
murazzi
, neglected since the fall of the Republic in 1797, were breached during an enormous storm, but were made good again. On a day in 1967, the first year in which accurate measurements were kept, the water rose five feet above the average sea level. In the forty-seven years between 1867 and 1914, only seven exceptionally high waters, those more than three and a half feet above the normal level, submerged the city; but in the fifty years between 1917 and 1967 Venice sank beneath the waves more than forty times, an extraordinary increase, so that looking at a vertical graph of these high waters during the period from 1867 to 1967 the lines representing them appear as eight more or less isolated trees between 1867 and 1920, some thick clumps in the thirties, late forties and early fifties, and a dense, soaring forest in the late fifties and sixties. The longest line of all is the one showing the
acqua alta
of 4 November 1966.

During the night of 3–4 November, the sirocco blew Force 8, the barometer fell to around 750 mm, there was continual heavy rain and waves twelve feet high roared in over the Litorali, submerging Cavallino, the northernmost one, smashing the elegant bathing establishments on the Lido and hurling aside the outerworks of the
murazzi
on Pellestrina, the great boulders piled fifteen feet high, then breaching, in ten different places, the walls themselves, composed of huge blocks of marble six feet long, but on which no proper repair work had been done for more than thirty years. This time the water at Venice rose six and a half feet above the average sea level, and the result was spectacular.

It poured under the 450 or so bridges (scarcely any Venetians, let alone outsiders, agree about the number of bridges in the city,
or any other of the following figures), overflowing the 177 – some say 150 – canals, the
rii
, 46 of which are branches off the Canalazzo, the Grand Canal, inundating the 117, or 122, or whatever number of shoals or islands on which the city is said to be built, the 15,000 houses in which large numbers of people were living on the ground floors in the six
sestieri
, or wards, into which it is divided, and the majority of the 107 churches, of which 80 were still in use. It also inundated 3000 miles of streets and alleys, the various open spaces, the
campi
, so called because they were once expanses of grass, the
campielli
and the
piazzette
, not to speak of the only Piazza, St Mark’s, with an unimaginably vile compound of all the various effluents mentioned previously in connection with the Lagoon. To which was added diesel oil and gas oil which had escaped from the storage tanks, leaving the city without electric light, means of cooking or heating, or any communication with the outside world, not to speak of the awful, immense, much of it irreparable, damage done to innumerable works of art.

The
acqua alta
persisted for more than twenty hours. The most dangerous moment came at six in the evening, when the water reached the highest level ever recorded. This was the moment that the Venetians call the
acqua morta
, when it should begin to go down but doesn’t. By this time the glass was down to 744 mm and if at this moment a fresh impulse had been given to the waters by the sirocco, forcing it to yet higher levels, Venice might well have collapsed. As it was, a miracle occurred. The wind changed. It began to blow from the south-west, a wind the people of Venice and the Lagoon call the
vento Garbin
, and by nine o’clock that night the waters began to fall and the city was saved, at least for the time being.

Long before we stepped ashore from the steamer on to Riva degli Schiavoni, the great expanse of marble quay off which Slavs from
the Dalmatian coast used to moor their vessels in St Mark’s Basin, darkness had added itself to the fog, creating the sort of conditions that even Jack the Ripper would have found a bit thick for his work down in nineteenth-century Whitechapel.

The fog dissipated what had seemed a romantic possibility when we left Chioggia but now seemed a crazy dream, that we might sweep into Venice from the Lido on the No. 11 steamer up the Canale di San Marco and see the domes and campanili of San Giorgio Maggiore and Santa Maria della Salute not as we had seen them once, coming in from the sea in the heat of the day, liquefying in the mirage, then reconstituting themselves again, something that would be impossible at this season, but sharply silhouetted, appearing larger than life, against the afterglow of what could equally well be a winter or summer sunset, with what would be equally black gondolas bobbing on the wine-coloured waters in the foreground. This was a spectacle we had enjoyed often, usually in summer, coming back after a long afternoon by the lifeless waters of the Lido with sand between our toes and stupefied with sun, our only preoccupation whether we would be able to extract enough hot water from the erratic hot water system in our equally decrepit hotel to allow us to share a shallow bath; and whether we could find another place to eat, in addition to the few we already knew, which was not infested with, although we hated to admit it, people like ourselves, fellow visitors to Venice who on any day in the high season, July and August, probably outnumber the inhabitants.

Never at the best of times a very substantial-looking city – even the largest buildings having something impermanent about them, due perhaps to the fact that they have not only risen from the water but, however imperceptibly to the human eye, are now in the process of sinking back into it – on this particular evening the fog had succeeded in doing what the mirage could only
accomplish for a matter of moments – caused it, apart from its lights, to disappear from view almost completely.

Disembarking from the steamer, we turned left on Riva degli Schiavoni, passing the entrances to the narrow
calli
which lead off from it, Calle delle Rasse, where the Serbian material used for furnishing the interiors of the
felzi
, the now largely extinct cabins of the closed gondolas, used to be sold, and Calle Albanesi, the Street of the Albanians, down which some of our fellow passengers had already vanished. While walking along the Riva we just missed falling into what is, because it is spanned by the Bridge of Sighs, the best known and most photographed canal in Venice after the Grand Canal, the Rio Palazzo. This would have been a bore because besides contracting pneumonia (our luggage was already at the railway station), if we had inadvertently drunk any of it we would have had to rush off to the Ospedale Civile, San Giovanni e Paolo, in order to have pumped out of us a mixture the smallest ingredient of which was water. Then we crossed the Rio by the Ponte di Paglia, passing on our right hand the Palazzo delle Prigioni, from which the magistrates known as the
Signori di Notte al Criminale
used to look out at night for evil-doers,
malviventi
, arrest and try them, and if they were sufficiently low and common and criminal, sentence them to the
Pozzi
, otherwise the Wells, the cells at the lowest level of the
Prigioni
, which were reserved for the worst sort of common criminals.

Then on along the Molo, the furthest point pirates ever reached when attacking Venice, back in the ninth century when it was young, past the forest of piles where the gondolas were moored, now, in this weather, all covered with tarpaulins, as they would be in the Bacino Orseolo, the basin behind the Piazza San Marco where there is another big fleet of them moored. For no one on a day like this would have used a gondola, unless they were
sposi
, newly married, or were dead and being conveyed in a funeral
gondola to Isola San Michele from one of the undertakers’ establishments on the Fondamenta Nuove. In fact, today, scarcely anyone goes to the cemetery in one of the old funeral gondolas, which were picturesquely decorated with a pair of St Mark’s lions in polished brass; now the undertakers’ boats are almost all big, powered vessels.

Then we turned right into Piazzetta San Marco, with the Palazzo Ducale on one hand and the Mint and the Library designed by Jacopo Sansovino on the other, passing between the feet of the two immense grey and red granite columns that someone had brought here from Syria or Constantinople. Somewhere overhead, invisible in the fog, the grey column supported the bronze lion, really a chimera, a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent, whether Etruscan, Persian or Chinese no one really knows, to which some inspired innovator has added wings. The other bears a marble figure poised on a crocodile, said to be that of Theodore, the Greek saint who was the patron of the Veneto until the body of St Mark arrived in such a dramatic fashion in the city (having been hastily cleared through customs in Alexandria by Muslim officials who had been told he was a consignment of pork). In fact the statue is not one of St Theodore at all, but is made up of several pieces from the ancient world, the topmost part being a magnificent head of Mithridates, King of Pontus. The statue is a copy. The original is in the Palazzo Ducale.

We entered the Piazza, described by Napoleon, in a rare lighthearted mood, and with reason, as the ‘finest open-air drawing room in the world’, an immense open space, originally paved with bricks, now covered with black trachyte, a fine-grained volcanic rock of rough texture, from the Euganean Hills near Padua, ornamented with narrow inserts of white Istrian marble. The design, made by Andrea Tirali in 1723, forms a pattern of interconnecting
squares and rectangles, punctuated by white dots on the black background, so that from the belfry of the Campanile high overhead, the Piazza looks as if two parallel rows of black and white carpets have been laid end to end in it on top of a large, black, fitted carpet, for the reception of some distinguished personage.

Although a superficial glance gives one the impression that it is rectangular, the Piazza is a trapezoid, a quadrilateral having neither pair of sides parallel, and is more than thirty yards wider at its eastern than at its western end.

Three sides of it are occupied by what appears to be one enormous, soot-blackened palace of what are, to all but the most pernickety, irreproachable dimensions. The fourth side is occupied by what is arguably the most fantastic basilica in Christendom, San Marco, a building surmounted by Islamic domes, embellished with cupolas and gilded crosses on top of them, that look more like extra-terrestrial vehicles sent to bear the building away to another world than the work of an architect.

To the right of the Basilica, facing the square, is the smallest of the two squares that lead into the Piazza, the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, furnished with a fountain and red marble lions. At the far end of this little piazza is what was once the splendid banqueting hall which used to be linked with the Ducal Palace by a corridor; and at the point where it ceases to be the Piazzetta and becomes the Piazza, an archway leads out of it into the street of shops called the Merceria dell’Orologio under the Torre dell’Orologio, a very pretty building with two bronze giants on top of it, who together strike the hours for the clock below on a great bell. Hidden within the tower are the Magi who, in Ascension week, emerge from a little side door, preceded by an angel, and pass before the Virgin in her niche above the gilt and blue enamelled clock face to vanish through a similar door on the far side, a procession they make every hour.